Rickrolled

Way to go YouTube. YouTube’s April Fool’s joke on the world today was to “Rickroll” everyone who clicked on one of their Feature Videos. Rickrolling is when you misdirect a link and trick someone into watching Rick Astley’s 1988 video “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Hilarious.

What is even funnier is reading the comments of people who didn’t get the joke and got annoyed thinking some idiot misnamed the link. Some people got really ticked.

Wired Blog posted a quote from Rick Astley today on the whole Rickroll phenomenon.

I am aware of it obviously, and I've had various friends over the last, I don't know six months or maybe more email me a link and stuff like this. And YouTube have been onto me about it as well -- not me directly, but my manager of the last twenty years...

It's weird, really, because I don't perform much anymore. I do the occasional thing. I'm going to do a few gigs later this year with some other people from the '80s, and it's a bit fun, but I'm not out there every week doing something to do with my former career. So it's a little bit strange.

It's a bit strange anyway, to be honest, to have videos of when you were a young guy out on the internet, do you know what I mean? I'm 42 years old now, so it's a little bit weird anyway. But it's funny. It makes me laugh -- I'm sure it really annoys a lot of other people -- but it's made me laugh occasionally.

Kudos to Astley for laughing when his song and video have become synonymous with internet pranks. Because, let’s face it, by Rickrolling someone you are essentially saying, this song and video suck so bad I am going to waste your time by making you watch it.

I was intrigued to find Rickrolling has also broadened outside of the misdirected link phenomena and become the internet generation’s “Give Peace a Chance” on some weird level as shown in this recent YouTube video where demonstrators stood outside of the Church of Scientology and protested the church whom they blame for the unnecessary death of Lisa McPherson.